Children's burial ground, An Chathair Bhearnach, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Grounds
On a steep south-easterly slope above Lough Currane in County Kerry, a D-shaped enclosure holds the quiet remains of a ceallúnach, an unconsecrated burial ground used for the interment of unbaptised children.
These sites, found across Ireland, existed outside the boundaries of consecrated parish cemeteries, and for centuries they received those whom the Church considered ineligible for Christian burial: infants who died before baptism, stillborn children, and occasionally strangers or suicides. This particular one, set into terraced ground on the slope of Knag, continued in use until at least the 1840s, making it one of the later-attested examples of a practice that persisted long after official disapproval.
The enclosure measures roughly 34.7 metres north to south and 42.6 metres east to west. Its boundary is only partially legible today: modern field walls have absorbed much of the northern and eastern edges, while traces of a low curving bank, standing about 1.2 metres high on the outside, may represent what remains of the original enclosure to the south and south-east. At the western side, a short stretch of drystone facing survives, and two low upright stones set roughly 0.8 metres apart are thought to mark the original entrance. From there, an artificial scarp running east to west divides the interior into an upper and lower terrace. The lower terrace holds the remains of a small hut and a leacht, a low commemorative cairn or altar-like structure of a kind associated with early Irish religious practice, here surmounted by a cross-slab. Between the hut and the leacht, a stony surface approximately 14 by 12 metres is dense with upright slabs and boulders, the physical trace of the burials themselves.
The site sits within the broader landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula, a part of Kerry long studied for its concentration of early medieval and prehistoric remains. The combination of a leacht, a cross-slab, and a hut within the same enclosure suggests a site with roots in early Christian devotional use, later adapted, as many such places were, into the more marginal function of children's burial. The view south over Lough Currane from this windward slope gives some sense of how deliberately set apart from settled ground these places were chosen to be.